The mitochondrion is popularly nicknamed the “powerhouse of the cell”, a phrase popularized by Philip Siekevitz in a 1957 Scientific American article of the same name.[4]
But know your meme attributes its meme status to this tumblr post from 2013:
Contrary to comments in many places like this reddit thread from 2018, I suspect the phrase wasn’t actually used in many textbooks or very commonly known prior to that tumblr post.
(If you search on Google Books you can find numerous textbooks using the phrase. Range-based search on Google Books appears to be broken so I’m not sure, but all the ones I checked were published well after 2013.)
Wikipedia says:
But know your meme attributes its meme status to this tumblr post from 2013:
Contrary to comments in many places like this reddit thread from 2018, I suspect the phrase wasn’t actually used in many textbooks or very commonly known prior to that tumblr post.
(If you search on Google Books you can find numerous textbooks using the phrase. Range-based search on Google Books appears to be broken so I’m not sure, but all the ones I checked were published well after 2013.)